My life as a pop star

As a child, like so many of us, Louise Wener dreamed of being a pop star. But for her it all came true. As the singer with Sleeper, she hit the big time during the Britpop era in the mid-1990s. The life was everything she had expected it to be, and more. So why did she walk away?

Friday 5 July 2002 21.01 EDT
First published on Friday 5 July 2002 21.01 EDT

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench. A long plastic hallway where pimps and thieves run free and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side." - Hunter S Thompson

I don't want you to think that I make a habit of this, but last weekend, in the name of research, I spent an indulgent afternoon with the curtains drawn, sifting through a pile of old Sleeper photographs, press cuttings and band mementoes. Tucked away in the attic, behind a tub of creosote and something pungent that re-whitens grout, are a pair of cardboard boxes that contain every groove of vinyl Sleeper ever pressed, and every inch of domestic and international print coverage that our publicist deemed worthy of indexing and wrapping in plastic.

I hadn't looked through any of these pictures and interviews since I moved house three years ago, and it was with some trepidation that I heaved the box on to the floor, split open the seal with a Stanley knife and tipped out its contents. There it was in black and white. My doe-eyed, twentysomething doppelgänger, staring out from the cover of the NME and a swatch of newspaper clippings proclaiming me the female heir apparent of something called Britpop. A pair of platinum albums coated in bubblewrap, their glassy surfaces still dusty with ancient cocaine residue, and a dozen giant festival posters, folded into a thick, neat roll. And, at the bottom, a bag full of discarded keys and backstage passes that once opened the doors to dressing rooms, tour buses and hotel rooms all over the world.

It felt like rummaging through the detritus of a distant love affair; and in the way that childhood summers have a tendency to seem hotter and fuller when you remember them, so my time in a band seems increasingly resonant and rewarding in hindsight. For much of the time, it was an insanely privileged and exhilarating experience. For some of the time, it was frustrating and crushing; not unlike swimming through mud.

This, then, is a potted history of that time; a survival guide, if you like. From a suburban childhood consumed by glamour and escapism, through the effluent-filled waters of the music industry and out the other side. To something simpler and altogether more agreeable - from life as a pop star, through life on the sofa watching Pet Rescue, to finding a job fit for a grown-up.

The one good thing about growing up with chronic asthma was the frequency with which I was allowed to stay home from school in the winter, listening to music. I had carrier bags filled with cassette tapes compiled from the Radio 1 chart rundown, and every Thursday night, without exception, I'd hold my tape recorder up to the mono television speaker in our living room and record the performances of my favourite pop stars, skilfully editing out my father's heckles from the sofa that Alvin Stardust was rubbish and that we should turn over. I played those tapes incessantly, committing the lyrics to memory and mimicking the tinny vocals as best I could. I discovered that the force of singing along to Wuthering Heights and whirling my arms above my head like Kate Bush made my breathing easier; and that the addition of a hairbrush, a mirror and a touch of bathroom reverb made it all the more enjoyable.

Like a million other kids growing up amid the tedium of a rundown English suburb, pop was the aural antidote to the inertia and net-curtain conservatism that surrounded me. In the same way that my father escaped the dreariness of his daily commute to the city by listening to Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington at the weekends, I escaped the malaise of Upstairs Downstairs and Morecambe and Wise by listening to Blondie, the Pistols and T'Pau. (I know, but you have to remember that I'm from Essex.)

Happily for me, I had an older brother who force-fed me Bowie and the Smiths throughout my teens, and while classmates trooped off to watch Imagination (1980s funk was the sound of the Ilford suburbs), I was dragged to Wembley Arena to see the Jam. For someone who'd never been to a gig before, the sight of Paul Weller and his cohorts ripping their way through A Town Called Malice was a near religious experience. What it fostered in me was a sense of otherness; an awareness that, beyond the conformity and complacency of my immediate surroundings, there existed something potent, raw and unforgiving.

When I arrived at Manchester University at the end of the 1980s, it seemed that every second person was a budding rock star. The pubs, clubs and dope-filled lecture halls were littered with adverts for singers and musicians, but I resisted the urge to join someone else's band until I felt capable of establishing one of my own. At the end of my final year, I joined forces with Jon Stewart, my then boyfriend and the guitarist with whom I would later form Sleeper, and we moved to London to look for gigs.

To begin with, we sounded not unlike the Sundays, but as time went on our music became increasingly influenced by US bands such as Hole, Nirvana and, most especially, the Pixies. At this point, women were picking up guitars all over London and the thrashy, angsty sting of Riot Grrrl was spewing out of clubs all over Camden. While the sight of so many women playing in bands was encouraging, it appeared that few of them were great fans of melody or proponents of the three-minute pop song and, since I so obviously was, I began to think that we might have a genuine chance. In spring 1992, the Sleeper line-up was completed by drummer Andy Maclure, who looked like Clem Burke and played like Keith Moon, and an implausibly handsome bass player named Diid Osman. We spent the next 18 months playing in windowless rehearsal rooms with prophetic names such as Broken Lives, and circling the seemingly impenetrable portals of the music industry, looking for a way in.

Towards the end of 1993, grunge loosened its grip on the British music industry just long enough to spew a gaggle of bleary-eyed A&R men on to the north London streets, waving chequebooks in their grubby, outstretched hands. In autumn that year, Sleeper secured a small development deal with Indolent Records, and over a Chinese meal and a bottle of champagne we signed away our careers for the princely sum of £12,000. For this small down-payment, we offered up our worldwide recording rights to six albums, and committed ourselves to a corporation whose whimsical business acumen and gross inefficiency still makes me weep.

It's fair to assume, as I did then, that an organisation dedicated to the purpose of selling records might exhibit some skills relevant to that purpose. The shock from which you never quite recover is discovering that record companies have no skills at all. They stumble around repeating the same three tricks over and over again. Everything moves forward on the basis of blind luck and muddled thinking. Perhaps in an effort to distract me from this fact, an executive from our record label escorted me directly from the record signing to the stall of a sour-smelling urinal and offered me my first line of cocaine. It made no difference. I already knew that I'd made a mistake.

In the mid-1990s, it was fashionable for major record companies to set up "independent" labels, or subsidiaries, in order to confer credibility on their newly acquired guitar bands. Indolent was one of these labels. Financed by BMG and run out of its offices in Putney, it was a vanity project for its two inexperienced managers. For some bands, the synergy of being financed by a major and signed to an indie worked rather well. They scored Brownie points in the music press for appearing to shun corporate involvement, yet had easy access to piles of filthy lucre when it came time to press and promote their records. For us, this worked in reverse. We gleaned no credibility from signing to Indolent, since it was so clearly and clumsily not independent; and, because the people who ran it had no clout within the wider company, we received funding more commensurate with a village bun shop. Everyone took bets on how long it would take for us to fall over.

Lined up at the Britpop starting gate in 1993, there were perhaps two dozen bands. They came in a ragged assortment of flavours. Oasis-alikes: the Bluetones and Cast. New wave punksters: Smash and These Animal Men. And female fronted: Sleeper, Salad, Elastica, Echobelly and Tiny Monroe. With a woeful label behind us and a sceptical publicist with his back to us in the wings, I estimated that we had six months, at best, to make our mark. Our first single, Alice In Vain, entered the charts at number 76 and I set about securing us a future by writing stand-up Top 10 pop songs and garnering as much press coverage as I could.

In his excellent book Black Vinyl, White Powder, Simon Napier-Bell describes how Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten were given to outbreaks of serial politeness until Malcolm McLaren got hold of them and begged them to say "fuck off" instead of "thank you". It was with this great tradition in mind that I strode into my first interviews, ready-made quotes tucked into the back pocket of my drainpipe jeans, hell-bent on claiming column inches for my band. I had no idea what I was walking into.

At this time, the music press was an anachronistic and ghettoised arena. Women who spoke in sentences were "opinionated", and intelligence was largely calibrated by the number of Wire B-sides you could name or the ability to demonstrate an encyclopedic knowledge of Led Zeppelin IV. Given that I had little interest in either, and was sure that I wasn't meant to own up to a childhood weakness for Alvin Stardust, I set out my stall rather differently. Raised on a diet of pop, punk and Holiday-era Madonna, it seemed to me that the very essence of being a rock star was to be provocative, rebellious and print-worthy, and I aimed to speak passionately and with candour. I lampooned political correctness, bowled googlies at the "women are good, men are bad" school of feminism, and aired my suspicions about all makes of politician whenever I was asked. There were doubtless times when I could have been more articulate and drunk less red wine before I set about railing against the world's ills, but, if nothing else, I like to think I lived up to my job description.

To begin with, this approach worked rather well, and we duly garnered much-needed column inches. But, as time went on, I attracted a faintly hysterical level of attention that far outweighed my apparent contentiousness. Male rock stars have always lashed out verbally and been blissfully unashamed of their sexuality, but, judging by the reaction I engendered from a male-dominated music industry, you'd have been forgiven for thinking that a woman never had. The way in which I was portrayed was always violently at odds with the way I viewed myself; all traces of playfulness and irony were obliterated. When I cast jibes at the "right-on" brigade by writing a song called Lady Love Your Countryside, a tongue-in-cheek eulogy to the pleasures of meat-eating, aerosol spraying and motorway building, I was baffled to find myself being taken seriously.

Because I wrote frank lyrics, I was depicted as sex-crazed and whorish (imagine such an accusation being levelled at a male rock star), and because I didn't lie down, look pretty and wax lyrical about my feminine angst, I was summarily demonised. One music paper even published letters in which men brayed for me to be burnt as a witch.

By the end of our first year, we had, I think, confounded all expectations. Bands that had been predicted to flourish (Salad, Smash, Tiny Monroe) had spun off into the pits with their engines on fire; we had begun to look like serious contenders. Our record company combed its pockets for some spare change so we could afford to buy equipment and pay a sound man, and our press officer duly began returning our calls. That May, a band called Blur invited us on tour with them to support their latest record - a modestly successful album called Parklife - and the following January we released our forth single, Inbetweener.

Three days later, my manager called me at my rented bedsit to say that our midweek chart position was number seven and that the single was selling out. I nearly fell over. With typical aplomb, our record company hadn't pressed enough records and couldn't re-stock the shops fast enough. The result was a final chart position of 16. It didn't matter. We had a Top 20 hit under our belts, and I knew I'd officially become a pop star because the following week we were invited to appear on Top Of The Pops.

In the four years that followed, Sleeper released three Top 10 albums, eight Top 40 singles, and sold more than half a million records. We toured Asia, Europe and America, and to begin with I found the travelling a joy. The seediness and glamour were as appealing as I'd always suspected they might be, and the fame was as vacuous and filthy as I'd imagined. You gorge on it like you would on a box of cream-filled chocolates, until you feel nauseous, light-headed and shop-soiled.

Nevertheless, there's something about lying in the back of a tour bus after a sold-out gig, listening to the moans of Tuesday night's groupies and knowing that Wednesday morning heralds a pick-me-up line of cocaine and a limousine ride to Vogue for a photo shoot with David Bailey, that brings a healthy glow to your cheeks.

Inevitably, the Tuesday night groupies fast became every night groupies, and out of boredom we'd sometimes hold a sweepstake on how many women the male band members and crew would sleep with by the end of a tour. I was never included in these bets for the simple fact that I never attracted groupies. While others were upstairs in their hotel room sharing eager fans two at a time, I was downstairs in the lobby being chased by shy teenage boys who wanted me to read their poetry. Sometimes they'd bring me books - I remember Albert Camus being a popular choice - and very occasionally they'd kiss me on the cheek before blushing furiously and running away.

With our records selling well and our gigs selling out, we ticked as many boxes marked "pop life" as we could. On the evening of my 29th birthday, we supported REM at Milton Keynes Bowl, and as we walked out into the fading sunlight and heard the roar from the crowd, I remember thinking that I might faint. Later that evening, still fizzing with post-gig adrenalin, we stood at the side of the stage watching REM storm through their set. In the middle of it all, something rather unexpected happened. The lead singer of the world's biggest band walked over, held out his hand and with impeccable Southern manners escorted me to the centre of the stage. He then proceeded to serenade me with a perfect rendition of Happy Birthday in front of a crowd of 70,000. That same year, another of our heroes, Elvis Costello, invited us to cover a song from his upcoming EP, and generously returned the favour by covering our single, What Do I Do Now? Listening to that insanely fabulous voice wrap itself around a song that I'd written was indescribably thrilling. Afterwards, we toured America with Costello and his old band mates, the Attractions, and I sat in the wings every single night, watching them distil their turbulent history and palpable tensions into performances of quiet, chilling brilliance.

By the start of 1996, tensions were also running high in our own band. Weeks on end sharing a living space the size of a galley kitchen do little for band relations, and touring had become claustrophobic, repetitive and dull. Because Jon and I had been in a relationship, we knew precisely the best ways to irritate each other, and Andy and Diid often got caught in the crossfire. To add to the strangeness, Andy and I had begun a relationship around the time we recorded our second album, The It Girl. At which point all four of us had buried our heads in our hands and wished we'd been wise enough to join a single-sex band.

It is to everyone's credit that we muddled through it - Andy and I are still together, and Jon has remained one of our closest friends - but for a while we escaped the pressures and inevitable tensions through drug-taking and wilful excess. Everything about being in a band is conducive to alcoholism and addiction, and Jon in particular took to the clichés of rock'n'roll indulgence with fabulous aplomb. The strongest thing that passes his lips these days is coffee, but back then he was rarely without a bottle of vodka and a freshly emptied wrap of cocaine. Restless hours were spent in foreign cities searching out drug deals and all-night bars, and transatlantic flights were characterised by Jon dragging us into airport toilets to polish off leftover drugs before we made our way through customs and on to the plane. Those of us who'd been game enough to join him would spend the next eight hours wired and anxious: safe in the knowledge that it would all begin again when we landed. There were many crazed and memorable evenings - we once abandoned our comatose bass player in a hotel room in Barcelona and flew home to London without him - but after promoting The It Girl for the best part of a year, we were dysfunctional, fragile and battle-weary, and desperately needed some time away from one another.

It wasn't to be. Amazed that we'd somehow been able to conjure a platinum album out of thin air, our record company licked its lips and requested that we make another record as quickly as possible. And it refused to underpin the band until we began recording. We gritted our teeth and got on with it.

In the studio next door, a bloated, pre-rehab Robbie Williams was putting the finishing touches to his debut album and, keen to know what an indie band might make of his first post-Take That outing, he touchingly and rather nervously invited us in for a listen. He had the reviews of Gary Barlow's last album (all stinkers) gleefully taped to the wall above the mixing desk and the first song he played us was Angels. I told him that I thought it was brilliant. It had, as its ebullient creator so rightfully and joyously declared, a chorus that was an 11 out of 10. As we walked back to our own studio that evening, there was a distinct chill of early autumn in the air and we pulled our skinny-ribbed T-shirts that little bit tighter around our shoulders. By the late summer of 1997, Britpop had become a little ashamed of itself and bands such as Blur - rather perversely, given all that they'd come to represent - were looking to America for their inspiration. Oasis were hanging out with Tony and his cronies at Number 10 and Cool Britannia was moments away from being exposed for the chimera that it so obviously always was.

Britpop's postmodern Union flag had been fluttering uneasily in the wind for the best part of a year, and by January 1998 it was little more than a frayed and faded washrag. Angels was the new national anthem, the Spice Girls were the biggest band in the world, and platinum-selling guitar bands were dropping like flies.

On the day Princess Diana was killed, Sleeper were making a video in London, and it was into the atmosphere of a country gone momentarily mad that we released our penultimate single. The signs were already bad, and on the Friday after its release, I received a call telling me that it had failed to dent the Top 20. In that instant I knew, as surely as if Dick Dastardly had appeared in front of me and ripped my medals from my shirt, that we were done for.

Without the buffer of a Top 20 hit to protect us, our label would withdraw its support and cancel worldwide promotion on our album, and to all intents and purposes Sleeper would be wound down. I spent that night drinking my way through a bottle of vodka, revelling in its powerful emetic properties, and in the months that followed, our band scrambled for support in a way that we had never done before. The people who signed us left the company and new ones who arrived to replace them quickly came and went, until there was nothing left to hold us there but mutual distrust. The following March, we played our final gig in front of 3,000 people at Brixton Academy, a fitting end to a tour that turned out to be a curiously celebratory and bacchanalian affair. We split up immediately afterwards.

It was a strange couple of years that followed. The first 18 months were characterised by my watching Quincy in my underwear and worrying about how long it would take before the last of my savings ran out. I missed being in a band, but I had no desire to form another one. I missed being busy, but I didn't miss getting up at five o'clock in the morning to be interviewed by glove puppets on children's TV. I missed touring and performing, but the thought of stepping on to another tour bus as long as I lived filled me with dread. Besides, there was something else that I had always wanted to do.

At the end of 2000, after several aborted attempts, I sat down with a typewriter and bumper jar of Kenco to write the opening chapters of a comic novel, the story of a band still pursuing their dreams of chart success in their late 20s, and called it Goodnight Steve McQueen. Six months, and much nail-biting later, I was delighted and somewhat overwhelmed to find myself with an agent, a two-book deal and a novel to finish. It was, without doubt, the most rewarding thing I've ever done. Beyond the pleasure and immense good fortune of finding something else that I enjoyed was the relief of discovering that the people who'd employed me were bright, sentient adults: in stark contrast to the hapless flotsam and jetsam to whom I'd become accustomed.

With everything I know now, I feel lucky to have got as far as I did in my music career. There were some wonderful moments, and had I not had the opportunity to experience them I'm certain I would have remained for ever curious. Arriving in LA after four weeks on a tour bus and racing to be first to jump head-long into the Pacific Ocean. Riding the bullet train past Mount Fuji at dawn, and being chased by mobs of excitable fans in Bangkok. Listening to the first playback of each new album and working with producers I liked and admired. I had a manager I loved and trusted (you need one person on your side, or you will not sleep at night) and the luxury of sharing the entire heady experience with my oldest friends.

If I miss anything, it's the shape and the smell of it all; the subtle shades and shadows that coloured my life for the best part of a decade. In other words, the very romance and otherness that attracted me in the first place. Trucks filling up with equipment, roadies plugging in monitors and guitars, and the feeling you get in your chest when you stand in front of your amp and the music burns so loud that your ears ring, well, for the rest of your life, actually.

Last week, I went to a friend's gig and spent a nostalgic hour at the bar sniffing the excitement and sweat out of the air; much like a retired medic might wander a hospital corridor inhaling the scent of disinfectant from the tiles. Just when I was wishing that I could do it all again, I went backstage to find the band in a heated argument about their record label and deep in discussion about the 13-hour, overnight journey they were just about to make in their rusted, ripe-smelling van. As one of them reached into his pocket for a neatly folded paper wrap, I made my excuses and left. I spent the rest of the night singing along to Kate Bush in front of the bathroom mirror, writing a new chapter for my second novel, counting my blessings and wondering what on earth I could have been thinking of

· Goodnight Steve McQueen, by Louise Wener, is published by Flame, priced £10.99. To order a copy for £8.99 (plus p&p), call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.